The XXXIII Olympic Games and the other forgotten history

Like hundreds of millions of inhabitants of the Earth, I was engrossed until the apotheosic end of the Olympic flame in the Montgolfier hot-air balloon, symbol of our common stellar home. 

It was a prodigious spectacle of technique, art and modern folklore, for some a little eccentric, which not even the persistent rain was able to overshadow. 

We were able to witness the might of imperial France, the France of science and the arts, with surreal and post-modern scenes, some of which were hard to understand. A five-hour spectacle that seduced and captivated the planet. To Caesar what is Caesar's. 

In all its plastic development, the ceremony was masterful, not so in its content, which, unsurprisingly, showed the intrinsic nature of the system that sustains the Olympic Games and the nation that executes them. It was a hymn to France, as seen by those who conceived it, in which those who should have been its main protagonists, the athletes, women and men, took a back seat. 

All the artistic and technological praise having been amply deserved, I cannot help but wonder: was there discrimination in the organisation of these Olympic Games? For me, the answer is yes. They were not the ‘Peace Games’, they were not the ‘Games of Fraternity and Solidarity’; they could not be; nor was that their function. Held in the midst of two major wars, Ukraine-Russia and Palestine-Israel, and many small wars, the 33rd Olympic Games rewarded some and punished others. Russia and Belarus were marginalised, stigmatised and condemned for their war of ‘aggression and invasion’ in Ukraine; while Israel was given resounding recognition with its banner bearing the war of ‘aggression and invasion’ in Palestine. Two cases, two attitudes, two responses. 

Both Russia and Israel put forward reasons to justify their acts of war. Moscow responded to the bloody coup of the Maidan Revolution in 2014 that killed thousands of people in the Donbass, a region that Russia historically claims. Tel Aviv responded in the same or similar fashion to the violent attack by the Palestinian Hamas movement on 7 October 2023 that resulted in 1,200 deaths and more than 200 Israeli hostages. Russia and Israel responded with war, of aggression for some, defence for others; but both nations have been punished for the former and rewarded for the latter. On one side of the trench, terrorism is alluded to, on the other, defence of the country. Neither the International Olympic Committee (IOC), nor the host country France, have made any distinction, nor have they explained their opposite behaviour in both cases. Talk of peace is a hoax. 

The president of the International Olympic Committee, the body that decides who participates and who does not, Thomas Bach, was full of words of friendship, solidarity, Olympic spirit, fraternity among athletes, that we are all equal here, that there is no racism or discrimination. But he did not say a single word about the thousand or so sanctioned athletes, Russian and Belarusian, because of their governments' policies, nor about the 340 members of the Palestinian Committee killed in the Israeli bombings. 

To save some of the dishonour, Thomas Bach came up with the idea of setting up an Athletes' Neutral Individual Group (ANI), with no flag, no anthem, no country identity, in which to include a few of the reprisal athletes, watched day and night by the police and the system's snitches; less than ten percent of the total number of athletes from both countries. Many of them have not agreed to participate in solidarity with their fellow athletes from Russia and Belarus, such as wrestler Shamil Mamedov, tennis players Aryna Sabalenka and Victoria Azarenka, and many more en bloc. Others did, just over 50. 

The Olympic authorities, like the French hosts, talked endlessly of peace, of the Olympic ethic, of the end of violence to resolve conflicts, while the countries donating arms, money and soldiers to the governments in Kiev and Tel Aviv, such as the United States, Germany, Great Britain and, of course, France, continue to collect large fortunes from the public purse to arm their allies and attack in one case the evil Russians in their own country, in the other the ‘Palestinian terrorists’ without distinction of age. A highly suspicious peace. 

Nobody mentioned the statements of the Palestinian Olympic Committee, represented with eight participants, which denounced that more than 340 athletes, referees and sports personnel have been killed by Israel in ten months of bombing and other indiscriminate attacks in Gaza and the West Bank, or as a result of the lack of medical care by a collapsed health system without resources because of the Israeli blockade. Nothing was said about this. 

The organisers of the Games and the host authorities insisted that Russia's war is against the principles of the Olympic Charter, which has always been respected. Totally untrue; the founding charter of Olympism may say so, yes, but it has rarely been respected. History tells us this. 

In 1956 the Olympic Games were held in Melbourne, with IOC President Avery Brundage, branded by many as a racist and anti-Semite, who enabled and extolled the South African apartheid regime and who piloted the Olympic Committee for 20 years. At the 16th Olympics in Melbourne, France, which was in the midst of a colonial war in Algeria, had its place of honour, as on previous occasions. No reproaches or sanctions. 

But even before that, during the First Indochina War, 1946/1954, two Olympiads were held in 1948 and 1952, in which France participated with full honours, even though it was the aggressor occupier of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. After the historic defeat of the French colonial armies at Diem Bien Phu in 1954, the Indochina war was taken over by the United States until 1975, when it was in turn defeated by the Vietnamese Army and the guerrillas of Cambodia and Laos, supported by the Soviet Union and China, and widespread American public opinion. Again, at the Olympic Games of 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972, i.e. five Olympics, there was no sanction of any kind against the United States for its invasive and devastating war in the Indochinese Far East. The only discordant note was the protest by the three black American athletes, 200m champions at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, who raised their black gloved fists on the podium in the manner of the Black Power movement in protest against the lack of civil rights in the United States. Avery Brundage, who sanctioned two of them by expelling them from the US Olympic Committee and from sports facilities, but without taking action against the cause of the ignominy, the US government, was also a great success. 

So it is not possible to speak of the Olympics of Peace, Fraternity and Solidarity. Athletes are not all the same; they have suffered from the ravages of the Cold War in the past, from Franco-British colonialism in the 20th century, and from North-South inequality today. To acknowledge this is a credit to them; to confront it is a virtue. 

Members of the Algerian Olympic Committee delegation staged a parallel ceremony, throwing flowers into the Seine in tribute to the Algerians killed and thrown into the river in 1961 while demonstrating for their country's independence. The Niger delegation gave a military salute as they passed in front of the official rostrum where French President Enmanuel Macron was standing, reminding him that his country is no longer under the colonial umbrella. It is clear that sport, which, like all other human disciplines, remains a weapon of mass control, has yet to be decolonised. We cannot look at the Olympics in isolation from this.